The emergence of human rights as a central theme in world politics is a recent phenomenon. The basic catalyst has been the UN Declaration on Human Rights (1948), the document which established the political-legal recognition of human rights in world politics. But even this truly innovative text remained at the margin of international relations for the next twenty-five years. Its ideas were honored in principle, but there was little effort to relate them in specific terms to the policies of states. This step, the inclusion of human rights in the foreign policy of states and international institutions, was taken in the 1970s. Since then both the study of world politics and its practice in political-strategic terms have been shaped – in part – by human rights. The literature on the topic has exploded into a cottage industry in the last forty years. Among the themes examined in the literature is the relationship, or the lack of it, between religious traditions and institutions and human rights. There is a spectrum of opinions on the question. Some acknowledge and welcome religious traditions (particularly in the West) as sources of human rights ideas and agents of human rights advocacy. Others see the human rights narrative in purely secular terms, belonging uniquely to the post-Enlightenment era.